Thirty-Fourth Avenue is starting to feel like Thirty-Fourth Avenue again. It’s like the time Quentin was in the hospital was a bad dream, and the entire block is waking up from it. I mean, it wasn’t a dream. For one thing, Quentin’s got a pinball machine in his bedroom. For another, he’s not back to how he was. He gets winded real fast, so there’s a lot of stuff we used to do—even just walking-around kind of stuff, let alone playing wolf tag—that we can’t do for now.
To be truthful, it would be easier if he’d let us push him in the wheelchair. But he shot down that idea the first time I suggested it, and no one’s brought it up since. So we’ve been hanging out mostly in Quentin’s room, and the few times we did get him out of the house, we had to take it real slow and stop for him to catch his breath every couple of minutes. He’s getting stronger, though. The plan is still for him to go back to school on Monday, but I’ll believe that when I see it. I don’t know how it’s going to work.
As for the pinball machine, it was fun for maybe three days, but after that we got pretty sick of it. That sounds ungrateful, for sure, but … well, it’s a pinball machine. It gets old fast. You want to know the weird part? The fact that it’s free, that we don’t have to drop in a dime to start a new game, makes it less fun. Lonnie shakes the thing until it tilts every time. I’m not sure he’s ever actually finished a game. It’s like a joke with him. He starts up a new game and then tilts just for the heck of it.
The last time I took a turn was on Thursday, after school. I don’t even know why I bothered. After the first five minutes, I got bored, but I kept hitting the bonus flag, which kept making the center post come up between the flippers, which meant the ball couldn’t roll down the center chute to end the game. It just went on and on. I tripled my highest score, but I felt like a prisoner. Finally, I just waited for the post to go down and let the ball slide between the flippers on purpose.
The only one who stuck with it was Shlomo Shlomo. Mr. Selkirk, my sixth-grade teacher, used to say that writing was my “thing.” Turns out pinball is Shlomo’s “thing.” What I mean is he took to that machine like a woodpecker to a tall tree. (Or like Beverly Segal to a tall tree.) The look on his face when he turned and noticed the pinball machine was love at first sight. Like one of those cartoons where the boy cat sees the girl cat, and his eyeballs go boi-yoing-yoing. It was comical to watch.
Except how can you hold it against him? Challenge the Yankees is the first thing Shlomo’s been better at than the rest of us.
Lonnie’s always had basketball. The guy can dribble between his legs like it’s nothing. Eric’s got baseball, on account of his dad coached Little League and taught him to switch-hit, even though Eric’s still afraid of getting beaned. Howie’s got football, or at least defense in football, because he loves to tackle people. He’ll tackle you even if you’re just playing tag. Not in a mean way, he just gets carried away.
On the other hand, Quentin, before he got sick, was a great wide receiver, because he had soft hands. I don’t think I ever saw that guy drop a pass. Plus, he even started to get faster in the last year. Before he got sick, I mean. It used to be that the only guy he could catch in tag was Shlomo. But then he started to catch Eric, and once he even caught Howie. So I guess, in a way, he was Quick Quentin, or at least he was getting to be Quick Quentin before he got sick. So let’s say Quentin gets the edge on offense in football, and Howie gets the edge on defense. Plus, you should see Quentin with a yo-yo! It might not count as a sport, but he can make that thing walk the dog and rock the cradle and go ’round the world.
Challenge the Yankees isn’t a real sport either, of course. But it’s Shlomo’s thing, so you’ve got to respect it. That doesn’t mean it’s not annoying. The rest of us will be yakking it up at one end of Quentin’s room, but we can’t even hear one another because Shlomo’s at the other end grunting and moaning, and meanwhile the machine is buzzing and dinging and clacking. He’s in his own world … challenging the Yankees. Lonnie joked that from now on, when Shlomo rings the doorbell, he should forget about Quentin and ask Mrs. Selig if the pinball machine is home.
You want to know how carried away Shlomo got with Challenge the Yankees? On Friday afternoon, he almost forgot about Sabbath! He did forget, actually. It was Lonnie who remembered. He slid up behind Shlomo just as the sun was going down, and tapped him on the shoulder. Shlomo hunched over the machine as if he was protecting his lunch. “C’mon, lay off!”
Lonnie said, “I just thought—”
“I got a good score going!”
“Yeah, it looks like you do.”
Shlomo still hadn’t taken his eyes off the game. “What do you want?”
“Isn’t there something you’re supposed to be doing?”
“No …”
“All right, let me put it another way,” Lonnie said. “Isn’t there something you’re supposed to be … Jew-ing?”
“What?”
“Do you know what today is?”
“Of course I know what today is. Today is—”
That was when it hit him, the fact that the sun was going down. It was like all of a sudden, he could feel the shadow across his face. His neck got real stiff, and his shoulders went up. He took a half step backward, but even then he couldn’t quite let go of the flippers. I don’t know what would’ve happened if, right at that moment, the telephone hadn’t rung. Even before Mrs. Selig picked it up in the kitchen, Shlomo knew it was his mom.
We all knew.
Shlomo let go of the flippers, grabbed his coat, and ran home.
The one other thing that happened last week was that my autographed picture of Bobby Murcer came in the mail, just like Jerry Manche had promised. It was signed, “For Julian. Looking forward to meeting you in April. Sincerely, Bobby Murcer.” As soon as I read that, I started to feel bad. What I mean is I feel bad the guy’s going to make a trip out to Flushing even though he’s not Quentin’s favorite player. (He sure as heck wouldn’t be making the trip just because he’s my favorite player.) But whose fault is that? Quentin was only trying to do something nice for me. He had no way of knowing that the Yankees would do what they did, that he’d wind up with a pinball machine and a visit from Bobby Murcer.
What makes it worse is that Murcer seems like such a nice guy. Last year, he got into a fight with Ray Oyler of the Seattle Pilots because of a hard slide at second base, which caused both teams to run out onto the field and start fighting, but the Post said that at the bottom of the pile, Murcer was already apologizing to Oyler for slugging him. That’s the kind of guy he is. So you just know he’s going to come out here and be real sincere and make a big deal out of Quentin—not realizing that Quentin’s favorite player is Willie Mays. The whole thing just feels wrong.
But what can you do?